Stories of my life, and his and theirs.
Sometimes I get a wee bit envious when I read something really good. Like it’s touching on material or themes or stories that I should have, or could have done, and somehow, they just got there first. It’s ridiculous. But it’s still a feeling sometimes; like I am capable of doing something along the lines of this author or that one.
And sometimes, there’s such a thing as post-envy. When you read something and there’s a sense of peace, of calm that comes from reading something so masterful, so luminescent and different and exciting that you can do nothing but marvel and soak in the beauty of new ideas, new thoughts, challenging stories and concepts. I can’t pretend to possess the ability to craft and write stories of the depth, breadth, and development that some do. Maybe someday. But today, I can marvel.
I try to marvel well at what is worthy of marvel.
Ted Chiang has written two short story collections: Stories of Your Life and Others (2002) and Exhalations (2018). Science-fiction is the easy category to stick him in and his pieces are all big idea; the meta sort of thinking on top of thinking and mobius-loop logics and stories stacked inside narratives that Jorge Luis Borges excelled at.
The title story is the source material for the Amy Adams film Arrival. One of my very most precious and beloved films of last decade. I still prefer the film to the story - perhaps strangely - but it is a testament to the execution of each within their art forms that they are both fully worth experiencing.
Anyway. The ideas and stories he explores in his two collections are mesmerizing, entertaining, and the sort of lucid dreaming that pulls from multiple disciplines and shows a deep understanding - or at least study and research - of so many fields that it’s mindboggling to think of the research and background that goes into each story.
My bud (on the left) didn’t understand all of it. It’s okay. I still don’t understand eighty percent of Borges’s Labyrinths, and it’s also one of my all-time fave collections.
So we moved to a great rendition of The Three Pigs next. Review coming soon.
____
